I don’t have the answer.
I know I shall never trouble your red-haired witch, Mona. I shall never trouble any of your powerful women. Many centuries have passed since lust or hope has tricked me into that adventure.
I am alone, and if I am cursed, I’ve forgotten it.
I like my empire of small, beautiful things. I like the playthings that I offer to the world. The dolls of a thousand faces are my children.
In a small way they are my dance, my circle, my song. Emblems of eternal play, the work perhaps of heaven.
Thirty-one
AND THE DREAM repeats itself. She climbs out of bed, runs down the stairs. “Emaleth!” The shovel is under the tree. Who would ever bother to move it?
She digs and digs, and there is her girl, with the long slack hair and the big blue eyes. “Mother!”
“Come on, my darling.”
They’re down in the hole together. Rowan holds her, rocking her. “Oh, I’m so sorry I killed you.”
“It’s all right, Mother dear,” she says.
“It was a war,” Michael says. “And in a war, people are killed, and then afterwards …”
She woke, gasping.
The room was quiet beneath a faint drone of heat from the small vents along the floor. Michael slept beside her, his knuckles touching her hip as she sat there, hands clasped to her mouth, looking down at him.
No, don’t wake him. Don’t put him through the misery again. But she knew.
When all the talk was over and done with, when they’d had their dinner and their long walk through the snowy streets, when they’d talked till dawn and breakfasted and talked some more and vowed their eternal friendship, she knew. She should never never have killed her girl. There was no reason for it.
How could that doe-eyed creature, who had comforted her so, in that kindly voice, milk spilling from her breasts, hhhmmm, the taste of the milk, how could that trembling creature have hurt anyone?
What logic had made her lift the gun, what logic had made her pull the trigger? Child of rape, child of aberration, child of nightmare. But child still….
She climbed out of the bed, finding her slippers in the dark, and reaching for a long white negligee on the chair, another one of these strange garments which filled her suitcase, full of the perfume of another woman.
Killed her, killed her, killed her, this tender and trusting thing, full of knowledge of long-ago lands, of valley and glen and plains and who knew what mysteries? Her comfort in the dark, when she’d been tied to the bed. My Emaleth.
A pale white window was hung in the darkness at the far end of the hallway, a great rectangle of glowing night sky, light spilling on the long path of colored marble.
To that light she moved, the negligee ballooning out, her feet making a soft skittering tap on the floor, her hand out for the button of the elevator.
Take me down, down, down to the dolls. Take me out of here. If I look from that window, I’ll jump. I’ll open the glass, and I’ll look out over the endless lights of the largest city in the world, and I’ll climb up and put my arms out, and then I’ll drop down into the ice-cold darkness.
Down, down, down with you, my daughter.
All the images of his tale went through her mind, the sonorous timbre of his voice, his gentle eyes as he spoke. And she is now debris beneath the roots of the oak, something erased from the world without a jot of ink upon a piece of paper, without a hymn sung.
The doors closed. The wind sounded in the shaft, that faint whistling, like wind in mountains perhaps, and as the cab descended, a howling as if she were in a giant chimney. She wanted to crumple and fall on the floor, to go limp without will or purpose or fight anymore, just to sink into the darkness.
No more words to say, no more thoughts. No more to know or to learn. I should have taken her hand, I should have held her. So easy it would have been to keep her, tender, against my breasts, my darling, my Emaleth.
And all those dreams that sent you out the door with him-of cells within cells the like of which no human had ever seen, of secrets gleaned from every layer and fiber gently plied from willing hands, willing arms, willing lips pressed to sterile glass, and droplets of blood given with the smallest frown, of fluids and maps and schemes and X rays made without a pinch of hurt, all to tell a new tale, a new miracle, a new beginning-all that, with her, would have been possible! A drowsy feminine thing that would not have hurt any mortal being, so easy to control, so easy to care for.
The doors opened. The dolls have been waiting. The gold light of the city comes through a hundred high windows, caught and suspended in squares and rectangles of gleaming glass, and the dolls, the dolls wait and watch with hands uplifted. Tiny mouths ever on the verge of greeting. Little fingers hovering in the stillness.
Silently she walked through the dolls, corridor after corridor of dolls, eyes like pitch-black holes in space, or gleaming buttons in a glint of light. Dolls are quiet; dolls are patient; dolls are attentive.
We’ve come back to the Bru, the queen of the dolls, the big cold bisque princess with her almond eyes and her cheeks so rosy and round, her eyebrows caught forever in that quizzical look, trying vainly to understand what? The endless parade of all these moving beings who look at her?
Come to life. Just for a moment come to life. Be mine. Be warm. Be alive.
Out from under the tree in the dark, walk again as if death were a part of the tale you could have erased, as if those fatal moments could be omitted forever. No stumbling in this wilderness. No false steps.
Hold you in my arms.
Her hands were splayed out on the cold glass of the case. Her forehead pressed against it. The light made two crescent moons in her eyes. The long mohair tresses lay flat and heavy against the silk of her dress, as if they were moist with the dampness of the earth, the dampness of the grave perhaps.
Where was the key? Had he worn it on a chain around his neck? She couldn’t remember. She longed to open the door, to take the doll in her arms. To hold it tight for one moment against her breast.
What happens when grief is this mad, when grief has blotted out all other thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, wonder?
Finally exhaustion comes. The body says return to sleep, lie down now to rest, not torment. Nothing’s changed. The dolls stare as the dolls will always stare. And the earth eats at what is buried inside of it as it always has. But a kind weariness overtakes the soul, and it seems possible, just possible, to wait to weep, to wait to suffer, to wait to die and lie down with them, to have it finished, because only then is all guilt gone, washed away, when you are as dead as they are.
He was there. He was standing before the glass. You couldn’t mistake him for anyone else. There is no one else that tall, and even if it weren’t for that, she knew his face too well now, the line of his profile.
He’d heard her in the dark, walking back down the corridor. But he didn’t move. He was just leaning there against the window frame and watching the light gather outside, watching the blackness fade and turn to milk and the stars dissolve as though melted in it.
What did he think? That she’d come to seek him out?
She felt shattered inside, weak. Unable to reason what to do, needing perhaps to walk across the floor, to stand beside him and look down on the smoky gloom of early roofs and towers, on lights twinkling along hazy streets, and smoke rising and curling from a hundred stacks and chimneys.
She did this. She stood beside him. “We love each other now,” he said. “Don’t we?” His face was so sad. It hurt her. It was a fresh hurt, touching her right in the midst of the old pain, something immediate that could bring the tears where before there had only been something as black and empty as horror.